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Today I want to share a summary of our visitor statistics for the year 2019.

This is the first year we experienced a decrease in new users and pageviews. The numbers are still very good but in the beginning until mid of 2019, we had a significant drop:

This might be caused by several reasons:

- Updates in the Google ranking algorithm that resulted in worse search rankings
- The update of the forum software that we did in 2019
- Too many ads on our site as we experimenting all the time what works best
- Lack of updates for the SimTools software and/or the SimTools plugins
- A saturation of interest for DIY motion simulator hardware in general.
Motion simulator technology has grown and is no more a fancy sophisticated trend for the sim racing and flight simulation community. There are also more and more commercial manufacturers for simulators.

On the other hand, it looks like organic traffic is restoring. The traffic has constantly grown since mid of 2019 which is a good indicator for the current year.

These are many variables but as the general curve still looks very solid and the Y graph shows a growing tendency I think we are still on the right path and there is no need for any big updates to our forum and website.

This is just a small overview of the XSimulator traffic analytics.
If you are interested in other numbers or if you have ideas about what we could do to make our site a more attractive place, please let us know.

I am glad to be part of this community and I am looking forward to seeing new great projects from you guys in 2020

Interesting @RaceRay...in addition to the points you have raise if I had to take a wild stab at a possible explanation I would suggest running an analysis of the prominence and frequency of posts covering more complex and technical aspects of motion simulation software and rigs, to see if there is a correlation.

It would be interesting to see the demographics of the communities age group.
I think the future of sims is in VR and much less physical simulator rigs which are too expensive/complex to build or buy especially for many of the younger generation.